Finally, A Non-Embarrassing Classical-Music Scene in a Blockbuster Movie

When classical-music fans hear that a new Hollywood production has a scene set at the opera or the symphony, they reflexively prepare to cringe. Typically, such scenes give a klutzy picture of musical life and come loaded with corrosive clichés. Actors portraying violinists hold instruments in ways that would generate a toneless screech if they were actually playing. Pretend conductors flap their hands a beat or two behind the orchestra. Alleged geniuses compose N.F.L.-highlights music. Although classical listeners sometimes make a sympathetic impression—“Moonstruck” and “The Shawshank Redemption” come to mind—for the most part they present a creepy gallery of repressive parents (“Shine”), pompous gangsters (“The Untouchables”), sneering Bond villains (“Moonraker,” “The Spy Who Loved Me”), glum vampires (“Interview with the Vampire,” “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”), kinky lunatics (“A Clockwork Orange,” “The Killer Inside Me”), fastidious serial killers (“The Silence of the Lambs,” “Hannibal”), and Nazis galore (“The Boys from Brazil,” “Schindler’s List”).

The tendency to associate classical music with murderous insanity is a curious neurosis of the American pop-cultural psyche. There is little evidence of such a predilection among real-life serial killers, who seem to prefer Black Sabbath, AC/DC, REO Speedwagon, and, of course, the Beatles. So where does the trope come from? In my book “The Rest Is Noise,” I argued that the “classical killer” image is rooted in the equation of Wagner and Hitler, but it undoubtedly goes deeper than that, down into murky old anxieties about masculine identity and the supposedly feminizing influence of what Theodore Roosevelt called “overcivilized” European culture. Psychological studies in the early twentieth century linked excessive musicality to nascent homosexuality. As Vito Russo showed in his classic book “The Celluloid Closet,” Hollywood contributed to the sissy-boy panic by inventing the stereotype of the Effete Killer, who consumes high culture with a vaguely Continental air. Homophobia is out of fashion in modern Hollywood, but xenophobia is not, as the enduring vogue for the Euro-villain testifies.

Given all that history, I was happily shocked by an extended opera scene in the new Tom Cruise thriller, “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation.” Early in the movie, we meet, or meet again, Benji Dunn, the charmingly jumpy tech whiz of the Impossible Mission Force. He is first seen playing the video game Halo on his computer terminal while blasting the “Marriage of Figaro” overture on headphones. This injection of Mozart into the impeccably all-American, hyper-masculine world of first-person-shooter games upends Hollywood convention so completely that the film’s writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, has to be thumbing his nose at it. Granted, Simon Pegg, who plays the Benji character, is British. To place an American in the same position might have caused audiences to freak out. But it’s a big step forward from Hannibal Lecter, who, one of these days, is going to be eaten alive by an exasperated viol consort.

Benji then opens his mail and is excited to find that he has won a free ticket to a performance of “Turandot” at the Vienna State Opera. He flies to Vienna, his arrival idiomatically heralded by Beethoven’s “Eroica.” On his way to the opera house, proudly stuffed into a tuxedo, he discovers that his ticket was arranged by Ethan Hunt, Cruise’s tireless super-agent, as a roundabout way of involving him in a scheme to disrupt the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor. Evidently, Benji is such a classical nut that “Turandot” was a fail-safe lure. And, no, he doesn’t seem gay.

A first-rate action sequence ensues. The curtain rises, and Puccini’s savage opening figure sounds. In what may or may not be a deep-inside musical joke, the first three notes resemble one of the recurring figures of Lalo Schifrin’s sinuously chromatic “Mission: Impossible” theme. A good ten minutes of the opera—recorded for the occasion by Lise Lindstrom, Gregory Kunde, and Vienna State Opera forces under the direction of Philippe Auguin—unfolds on the soundtrack as Cruise pursues no fewer than three assassins, one of them equipped with a bass-flute rifle. Bits of the opera are jumbled together in somewhat random order: a telescoped version of the opening is followed by the orchestral accompaniment to Turandot’s “Figlio del cielo,” from Act II. (If this seems like stereotypical classical-music nitpicking, I defer to the video-game critic who complained that Benji couldn’t have played Halo 5 on triple monitors, since the Xbox One “only supports a single-display output.”) The music makes its impact all the same, and there’s a palpable sag of tension when Puccini hands over the reins to Joe Kraemer, who scored the remainder of the film.

The scene pays deft homage, as Anthony Lane notes in his review, to one of the great musical setpieces in film: the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s second version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” in which Bernard Herrmann conducts the London Symphony in Arthur Benjamin’s “Storm Clouds” Cantata at Royal Albert Hall while Jimmy Stewart hunts for an assassin. Hitchcock generates extra suspense by giving viewers a glimpse of the score: when we see a passage marked “poco a poco crescendo,” we sense that the attempted assassination will take place at crescendo’s end. Likewise, McQuarrie shows one of the killers flipping ahead in a score, to the climax of “Nessun Dorma”: Calaf’s final cry of “Vincerò,” with its rise to a high B and step down to an A. The last note is helpfully circled in red. You don’t need to know how to read notation to realize where this is headed: the high note pulls the trigger. Performances of “Turandot” are bedevilled by the problem of the ending, which Puccini tragically did not live to write. Here, the police decide the issue by removing the singers from the stage.

The Vienna State Opera can expect a slight uptick in sales as a result of this publicity, although the company hardly needs a boost: in the 2014-15 season, attendance was at ninety-nine per cent of capacity. Otherwise, the effect will probably be negligible. Despite the positive vibes, this film still presents classical music as a sphere of exaggerated wealth and power—the average crowd is a lot schlumpier—to which an Everyman has gained temporary admittance. I’m reminded of what the pianist Jeremy Denk wrote on his blog a few years back, after noting a Schubert allusion in one of the “Twilight” movies: “This was one of these moments where Popular Culture decides for a capricious instant that Hundreds Of Years Of The Western Canon are temporarily useful for appropriation; it does classical music a huge favor by Noticing It. Lovers of classical music are supposed to beam and pant like a petted dog, grateful for any and all attention.”

Even so, it’s good to see a film in which classical music isn’t the “preference of monsters,” as Denk puts it. Indeed, the arch-villain of “Mission: Impossible” ignores the performance and monitors the backstage mayhem on his smartphone. This is probably more in line with how masters of the universe behave at the opera.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.

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